Brooke Linden

Hi all, As I indicated in the March Marketplace Update , I will be posting the April update to this forum before the April User Group occurring on April 6, 2011 at 10:00 AM SLT. Before I do that, I’d like to find out what you all want to hear about. Please take some time to fill out this survey, and I’ll provide an update on the top 5 topics. If there is no change since the last update, I’ll indicate that (with a pointer) and skip to the next topic of interest. Please complete the survey by Monday, March 28, 2011 at 5:00 PM SLT. I will send out an update on April 1, 2011. Questions submitted beforehand or during the User Group will be addressed on a topic-by-topic basis. Please read the April Update if you plan to attend the April User Group, which will ensuer that the meeting provides more detailed information for everyone. Thanks! Brooke P.S. The April Update will include information on some of the issues/concerns that have been mentioned on the active Commerce Forum threads related to Maturity and Search.

This Thursday’s deployment had the following fixes: Correct message is displayed when a listing is flagged and removed. Number of listings per page and layout are now cached between searches. Updated messaging when accessing a listing’s direct URL which current settings may prevent access to. Updated help and Knowledge Base links to point to the new Community Platform. During the deploy, Marketplace had an unexpected downtime that lasted approximately 2 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience. Brooke

Hey all, I meant to post this earlier--apologies for the delay. I just wanted to call attention to a program we will be testing over the next couple of months. The program is called “Dash Deal” and we’ll be running 6 tests with different merchants, followed by a survey. The program itself was developed, in part, based upon feedback collected from a survey we recently emailed merchants. Here’s the blog post for more details: http://bit.ly/g51zTN. Happy promoting! Brooke

Shoppers love a deal. And when it’s a deal with a deadline, it’s almost impossible to resist. Now we’re offering a new program to help Merchants deliver great deals on Marketplace in a way that’s quicker and easier for shoppers—and who doesn’t love that? The “Dash Deal” test program will enable Merchants to attract new customers and for shoppers to score deep discounts on one selected item from the best virtual goods on the Marketplace. Scheduled to launch in April, the “Dash Deal” test program aims to make good deals easier to find and boost visibility for our Marketplace Merchants. Marketplace Merchants interested in participating in the program should apply here. How does the program work? Starting in April, a single new “Dash Deal” will be selected one day of each week and promoted at a deep discount of at least 50% off and available for only 24 hours. Linden Lab will promote each Dash Deal to the general Resident population, increasing awareness of both the Merchant and Marketplace. How will Linden Lab promote the Dash Deal program? Linden Lab will be employing a complete marketing campaign to drive traffic to a single Dash Deal on Marketplace one time each week during the test period, including: direct email to active users, Twitter, and Facebook. How will giving a discount help Merchants’ business? By discounting your item for 24 hours, you will attract the attention of deal-minded shoppers who otherwise might never have noticed your store. It’s a great way to build brand recognition with new customers, giving them a chance to experience your high-quality items and encouraging some to come back for future purchases. What are the benefits of participating in the program?Marketing support from Linden Lab Boost in sales for the Dash Deal item Increased visibility for your Marketplace content Enhanced brand recognition for your store among shoppers Where are the program rules and requirements? More about the criteria, rules, deadlines, and legal fine print can be found here. Keep in mind that this is a test program, so these rules are subject to change—particularly if the test is successful, and we move forward with the program in the future. We will also be soliciting feedback through a survey after the test is complete, so you will have the opportunity to share your ideas with us. We look forward to promoting our Merchants through this test.

Traffic has been pretty light on questions, so I'm addressing in bulk. Here you go (note that I've paraphrased questions for brevity and pulled in details from the Update post as necessary): Question: Has something changed recently with Magic Boxes? Answer: There have been no recent changes with Magic Boxes. We monitor delivery rates regularly. If there is a trend downward that does not recover w/in a few days, we have a developer take a look to assess if there is a quick fix that can be applied. Note that the long term goal is to improve delivery with the AIS delivery system. Question: Is AIS the new official term for MagicBox-less delivery system. Answer: It's the term we are using to refer to the system during the development cycle. It will be branded differently when we roll it out. Question: Will merchants be able to opt-out of AIS delivery? Answer: During the migration, merchants will be able to choose which items will use the new delivery system by uploading items to the Marketplace using AIS. Items uploaded with a Magic Box will use Magic Box delivery. Items uploaded with AIS will use AIS delivery. There will be no explicit opt-out. Question: What is the migration plan? Can I just move all my AIS transactions to a new account? Answer: This migration plan to move all users from Magic Boxes to AIS delivery is still in progress, though the system is designed with migration in mind. Let's table the rest of this for the User Group, as I'd like to understand why a new account is desirable. Question: When will merchants see the details of AIS? When will we have access to try AIS out? Answer: We are still working on the user experience. The work that has been going on up to this point is infrastructure to support delivering items to a shopper in world and pushing an item to the Marketplace to sell. The basic idea is similar to the Magic Box flow: you put an item in a particular location in your inventory, and you will be able to sync it to Marketplace and list it for sale. New items purchased on the Marketplace will be delivered to a specified location in purchaser’s inventory. Since the user experience and beta test plans are still in progress, I cannot give a hard date for communicating either piece of information. The goal for getting the Beta plan completed is mid April. There is no current private Beta group. Question: When will reporting match what we had on XStreet? Answer: This is currently not planned. We are aware that there is much that can be done with reports, and we would like to address it. The “when” will be based upon company priorities and feedback from merchants. It will definitely not happen before Q3. Question: What is the Marketplace doing to assess effectiveness and address issues with the relevance algorithm in search? Answer: We are working on getting better logging in place for anlalysis of search results. We have identified a couple of small fixes that we would like to address over the next couple to a few months (as we can fit in with AIS work) that may help with problems (new item ranking, keyword stemming analysis). Additional issues we'll be addressing as we gather data and prioritize within the backlog of items we are working on. Question: Is there a bug with Best Sellers? Answer: Not that we are currently aware of. I just went to the Best Selilng Items page and see items worth thousands of dollars intermixed with less expensive items. If you still see this problem over a period of time, please file a JIRA. At this point, additional issues will be addressed in the next update and the User Group. Thanks! Brooke

I'd like to clarify our goals on Tuesday versus Thursday releases: Large or riskier releases are limited to Tuesday releases Small, iterative changes and urgent bug fixes can be deployed on Thursday (or Tuesday) as needed The regression referenced above was not introduced in the Thursday release, but in the larger release on Tuesday. Thanks, Brooke

This Tuesday’s deployment had the following fixes: If additional listings may be available for a shopper to view and purchase, but are limited by current maturity settings or logged-in state, a message is displayed letting the shopper know more results may appear if the maturity level is changed or the shopper logs in. We fixed a bug to address failed logins for new user accounts associated with an email address already on the Marketplace. Thanks to those who alerted us to the login failures at the end of last week. We were able to quickly address and roll out with today's release. Brooke

As planned, the release was just deployed for Marketplace that includes “Adult” as an option in the Maturity drop down for search. Happy Shopping! Brooke

Here are some of the questions that were not addressed as part of the User Group, or included above. Question: As we test SLM right now, it appears that a notice has vanished which reminds people to log in to see all products that they may wish to buy. What's happened there? Can we have that warning back, big and bold, and on every page where multiple products are listed (i.e. front page, search results, all category browsing pages)? Answer: We will be adding new messaging here, as well as general messaging as user education to let shoppers know they may see more results when doing a search that does not include all maturity levels. Question: How can a merchant file a complaint if a Marketplace listing rating is modified and you believe this modification has occurred in error? Answer: Please file a ticket with Customer Service here. Question: Will we be able to track how many times each of our listed products is actually viewed in a day? Answer: This is a great suggestion. I’ll make sure it’s on the backlog. Question: The Highlighted listings on the front page don't wrap from the last page back to the first page. Will that be fixed so that a person can cycle back through easily? Answer: There are no plans to do this. If you have not already, please file a JIRA. Question: Could we possibly have these meetings more frequently (weekly would be much better), as there's clearly too much to fit in on a monthly basis, at least for the present? Answer: Not at this time. This is part of the reason we are using other communication methods such as a monthly newsletter.

In order to make sure a broad group of merchants is getting information on the current top topics on the Marketplace, I’m going to begin summarizing in a monthly communication. Much of what is covered here was discussed in the March User Group, so please review the transcript for additional answers. Next month, expect this update before the next User Group--read on for more details. Completed in February During the month of February, we continued to work on the AIS project to improve item delivery. We completed some new features and fixed some bugs that had been languishing. The top items: Improved gifting: New workflow to allow designating an item as a gift on its detail page rather than in the Cart. So far there has been a dramatic decrease in Customer Support tickets related to misdelivered gifts. We’ve also seen a slight and consistent increase in the number of gift transactions, not counting the spike we saw and expected to see for Valentine’s Day. Improved cart and order history: The gift recipient’s name now appears in the order history.  The cart and order history now display items from different merchants in a more compact format.  Each line item now includes a link to the merchant’s store. Fixes to prevent incorrect assignment of a maturity level to certain items (more to come). Home page performance improvements. Coming up in March (and into April) In March, work will continue on AIS. In addition, the following items are currently planned: Improved search options for maturity.  The shopper will be shown a prompt that more items may be viewable after login, or after increasing the maturity level of the search. See the Release Notes thread for more details. Improved search infrastructure for keeping search highly available as the Marketplace grows. Improved logging to help better identify and diagnose trends and possible issues with search. Fixes to accurately reflect the reason an item was flagged and removed from Marketplace. Beyond March, continued work on Search will include addressing Merchant control of item ranking within a Store.  Today, the items most recently added appear at the end of search results. Updates on Top Items (Based upon User Group Survey) The following is meant to highlight what our planned work includes, but does not include known issues that we will prioritize, then either fix or address in another way.   Store Customization: Ability to sort items in the store is tops and we will fit this in when we can. Inventory delivery Beta testing is in the planning phase. We will communicate more details as they become clearer. In the initial rollout, AIS delivery and Magic Box delivery will exist side by side. Merchants will be able to determine which delivery method is used on an object-by-object basis. This means that you can test AIS with one or two listings and add more as desired. Reporting/History: the top priority here is to get the CSV downloads to include the required data. We have made this the top priority is so merchants will be able to pull the data and analyze it as they would like to. Additional built-in reports will be considered as merchant feedback comes in. Merchant/Linden Lab Communication A monthly update on the Marketplace will be posted in the Merchants forum. This is the first one. Next month, it will be sent out before the User Group and questions will be addressed during the meeting. Release Notes will start to be communicated when a release is completed.  These will be seen as sticky posts on the top of the Commerce forum until the next release is deployed. To sign up for RSS feed notification of posts by me, other Lindens or Residents, see this forum post.  On the Forums, there is a public Commerce Forum and private Merchants Roudtable Forum. We will be continuing both groups for the time being, but we welcome feedback. Official Linden Lab Communications will be on the this Forum or the Commerce Blog. (Note: the commerce blog archives are in the process of being restored). Surveys and/or polls will be used to gather priorities and feedback from Merchants and Residents in an easily quantifiable way. Store Management: One thing to highlight here is that when AIS delivery rolls out, the ability to test delivery of a product (with no commission) will be part of that release. Additional work on store management has not been scheduled at this point. Please respond with additional questions that are not answered in the March User Group transcript  or the additional questions in the first response to this post. Some questions may be deferred to the next monthly update or User Group. Thank you, Brooke

As some of you (12%) experienced this morning, not all item listings were appearing in search results before we declared the Marketplace update complete. Thank you to all who let us know that there was a problem. We found and fixed the issue within 3 ½ hours after the deployment. Our goal is to avoid failures such as this one in the future. We have already identified several process changes which will help us prevent similar failures. Thanks for your patience! Brooke

Hi all, Here is a quick overview of the Marketplace search changes released this morning. Shoppers can now choose from 3 (soon to be 4) search options when searching on the Marketplace. The chosen search option is used to filter all content visible on the Marketplace, including Featured Listings and Ads. Here are the search options (and the actual/planned release date): General (March 8 release) General, Moderate (March 8 release) General, Moderate, Adult (March 8 release) Adult (Planned for March 10 release) Once this value is set on the Marketplace, it persists until it is changed--even across browsers and computers. This means that if you choose to view Adult content, you will see Adult content the next time you log on, no matter where you log on. Please see the Knowledge Base for more information on how this works. Brooke

The Marketplace will be down from 8:30 AM SLT through 10:30 AM SLT on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 for a software update.

This is a post for links of intereste to merchants. I'll bubble up links to this post from the thread as makes sense. Please feel free to respond with helpful links! User Group Links User Group links that may be of interest to merchants: Main User Group Page Marketplace User Group Page (includes links to transcripts in the Archive section) Advertising User Group Page (includes classifieds) More to come! Please respond with suggestions, and we'll get them added. Thanks! Brooke NOTE: this topic was floated to the top--now it is referenced from this thread.  

Welcome to the Merchants Forum. I'll be updating this post with information as we go along so that new users to this Forum can easily find tips and tricks on using this Forum, as well as useful information for Merchants. Links of interest User Group Links User Group links that may be of interest to merchants: Main User Group Page Marketplace User Group Page (this user group is currently on hold) Advertising User Group Page (includes classifieds) Marketplace Links Here are some links that may be helpful to Marketplace Merchants: Buying and Selling links in the Knowledge Base Thread with other helpful links Other Useful Links Customer Service web interface Forum Tips Getting Notified of New Posts There are various ways that you can choose to be notified on new posts to Forum threads. To learn more about various methods for notification, please check out the Community Help section. One quick tip, I'd like to share is how to get notified via RSS when a specific user makes a post: Click on the user name to view the user's profile page. In the first section, Recent Posts, click on View All. Under the Message Options drop down, click on Subscribe to RSS. For those who'd like a shortcut to subscribe to posts by me, here's a bit.ly link that will only require you to do step 3 above: http://bit.ly/hiKE5B. More questions? Please add more questions as responses to this post. As we discover new tips and tricks that we want to bubble up to this post, I will add them here. Please feel free to post tips you've discovered as well. I don't want to re-invent the FAQ here, so I'll be selective what gets pulled in, but this thread will be a great resource for everyone. Thanks all! Brooke  

All User Group transcripts will be accessible from the Marketplace User Group page under Archive: http://bit.ly/e1eXJa Thanks to all who attended--more to come on this. Brooke

“Spring Break” is the theme for our Marketplace promotions in March. If you would like to boost traffic to your Spring Break-related items for sale on the Marketplace, please add the keyword “beachbonanza” to your relevant listings. We will be using embedded search on that keyword in links in our outbound promotional channels—starting in the first week of March. Please be sure to use the keyword with your relevant wares.

You all may have seen that, in preparation for the new Community Platform, Forums, Blogs and Answers will be in read-only mode starting Feb. 21, at 12:01 am PDT. During this time period, communication out for any urgent Marketplace updates will be occurring on my user page on the wiki, and tweeted from the @slmerchants twitter account. Please continuet to use the following communication channels for communication to us about Marketplace: JIRA: for defects and feature requests Customer Service: for help with refunds, maturity and flagging questions/issues, other Marketplace issues that may not be defects Thank you for your patience while we work to improve our communication tools! Brooke

Hi all, I just wanted to let people know that the gifting updates have been released. Here is a summary of the changes: We have a new button: "Add To Cart As Gift" New Residents are giftable right away Giftee now visible in the order history There is also a link to the Merchant's store in the order and order history now. For more information, please see the wiki page on this update. Please let us know what you think of these changes. Happy gifting! Brooke

As you are all aware, we are continuing to work on Maturity issues. If you see something that should be flagged, go ahead and do so. We're still looking into the issue some of you are reporting for items that were moved from a more restrictive category to a less restrictive one. As I commented yesterday, we had a Maturity User Group today. Here is the transcript. Brooke

Apologies to the delay in the update on this thread. We monitored performance over the weekend, and we saw a significant improvement to the performance of Moderate items on Marketplace. Many of the issues we had seen with the function of our filtering mechanism are now fixed, but we will have more work to do. (This includes how we handle modifications of maturity ratings of items.) I'll be meeting with a group of Merchants and shoppers tomorrow afternoon to solicit feedback on the next set of changes and solicit ideas for next steps. (For those who want to know how these Residents were chosen, see my response to the forum post on User Groups.) The transcripts from this meeting will be posted publicly. Brooke

Sorry for the delay in getting these out. Thought I had posted last night, but it got lost in trying to get the release out. Here they are: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Brooke_Linden/Office_Hours_Transcript_2011-02-03 Brooke

A release has just been completed. Here is the PJIRA link: WEB-3583. I have spot checked items from each merchant and found expected results, except for 2 merchants indicated in the JIRA. The issue is now closed. If you still see issues, please file a Customer Service ticket. This will be the new process going forward (the Customer Service team did initial reviews of items on the PJIRA and sent issues to the dev team, so this is not a change in process). Please use this process for a quicker response to any issues. Here are the fixes: by default, Residents 18 and over will be able to see Moderate content fixes to the filtering engine to allow things such as the number "5" Brooke

I've reviewed the feedback here. Based upon the feedback, I am going to limit conversations/updates on Maturity to 15 minutes (hopefully it will be shorter!) and talk about other things. I am likely going to have to end the meeting about 15 minutes early to catch up on some last minute items before the deploy tomorrow--just a heads up on that. I am going to do the meeting in IM tomorrow. Here's the agenda I've pulled together: Maturity issue updates (15 min) Maturity lessons learned (part of the above 15 min) Gifting update Communication updates (brief) Hot topics Anything new that comes up overnight Delivery problems/planned fixes: update Feature requests/fixes (we need to consolidate this list with PJIRAs and track them, and allow voting so we can prioritize)Category cross listing Store improvements (branding/departments, images/landing page customization, sorting, multiple stores per merchant, multiple merchants per store) Additional search options (w/in a store, for a merchant or store, listing only) Bulk image upload->improved image management w/in listings Ratings and reviews->improvements on reporting/viewing, controversy over required review if leaving a rating Related items Editing an item drops its search relevance New items default to end of search results Weekend coverage for addressing flagged items Different colors/sizes on same product Reporting-improved sales reporting Improved enhancements Stale listing cleanup->charge a fee to relist (look at logins from merchants or something) PIOF to sell inworld and on SLM Better listing features: youtube, description Email notifications (too many per sale) Email notifications to the merchant to key events (i.e. item flagged, background updates) Ad pricing changes Search Free test delivery Edit item improvements I'll see those of you who can attend in world tomorrow! Brooke

Hi all, In order to try accomodating different schedules, I'm having this week's user group (formerly called office hours) at 9am PST on Thursday, 2/3. Apologies for not getting this out be EOW last week. Friday was a bit of a busy day parsing feedback and identifying issues with the Maturity roll out. Please submit agenda items for this week's meeting. I plan to discuss the following: Maturity: I will be asking for pro-active feedback on what we can do in the future to make transitions like this a better experience for us all. I'll be starting with a list that those of us involved in the project on the Linden Lab side have come up with. We'll add suggestions/comments from you all and help that shape the practices of the Marketplace team going forward. I'd like to limit conversation on Maturity to 30 minutes maximum. User Group Update: Plans for user groups. Other topics? I'll be updating the wiki shortly. I'll also be sending out an update on the Maturity thread at EOD today--just haven't had time to write it up yet. Please try to submit agenda items by EOD Wednesday, 2/2. Thanks! Brooke Adding link to invitation: http://bit.ly/g2nPaj Message was edited by: Brooke Linden